I’m playing around with a concept right now that I’m calling "Jekyll jobs". As you may know, all of my websites use Jekyll, and run on Github Pages. Currently I have over 100 separate repos, and managing the content, and data across these repos can get complex.
I use a standardize approach I call “hacker storytelling” for publishing each of my projects, so I have a handful of things I need to update, ranging from the look of the site, to changes across all Jekyll posts, or pages. To help me keep things orderly and efficient I’m considering a lightweight, API driven, jobs framework to help me manage.
I am looking to make many of these “jobs” available to my girlfriend as well, allowing her to target specific resources, with specific jobs. Some of the jobs I’ve outlined are:
- Link Management - Help me catalog, and manage the health of links that are used across all blog posts. A lot of links change, go bad, or any other numerous illnesses that occur.
- Image Management - Help me catalog, optimize, and manage images that are used in my blog posts. I’m pretty good about manually doing a lot of this, but I sure could use help.
- HTML Management - Sometimes HTML code gets ugly, either because I wrote it and didn’t give it the attention it needed, or possibly because it was generated out of another system, either way there is cleanup and maintenance from time to time.
- Content Management - After I write a post I like to constantly re-evaluate tagging, indexing, and providing additional links to related content.
- Content Indexing - My search across all of my Jekyll drive sites is not the best, and I’d like a way I can index all, or specific collections, and serve up as simple search API, maybe using ElasticSearch or something.
As more of my world runs as small, modular, Jekyll projects, I’m needing a way to run jobs against them, and designing APIs that do what I need, and use the Github API to work with my Jekyll site content, makes sense. I’m thinking I will just pass a Github user, and repo name, as parameters to each Github job API, and have it run a specific task against my _posts folder in the Jekyll install.
Since I’m designing these Jekyll jobs as APIs, I can run each one as an API request, and keep the job logic separate from each project. I’ll get a couple of these setup, than blog more about the pros and cons of this approach-who knows it may not be what I need to get it done.
